"Mark Twain. Tom Sawyer Abroad (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

gait, and I couldn't hold on forever. So Tom took a think, and struck
another idea. That was, to kill a lion with the pepper-box revolver, and
then sail away while the others stopped to fight over the carcass. So he
stopped the balloon still, and done it, and then we sailed off while the
fuss was going on, and come down a quarter of a mile off, and they helped
me aboard; but by the time we was out of reach again, that gang was on
hand once more. And when they see we was really gone and they couldn't get
us, they sat down on their hams and looked up at us so kind of
disappointed that it was as much as a person could do not to see THEIR
side of the matter.


Chapter VI. IT'S A CARAVAN


I WAS so weak that the only thing I wanted was a chance to lay down, so
I made straight for my locker-bunk, and stretched myself out there. But a
body couldn't get back his strength in no such oven as that, so Tom give
the command to soar, and Jim started her aloft.
We had to go up a mile before we struck comfortable weather where it
was breezy and pleasant and just right, and pretty soon I was all straight
again. Tom had been setting quiet and thinking; but now he jumps up and
says:
"I bet you a thousand to one I know where we are. We're in the Great
Sahara, as sure as guns!"
He was so excited he couldn't hold still; but I wasn't. I says:
"Well, then, where's the Great Sahara? In England or in Scotland?"
"'Tain't in either; it's in Africa."
Jim's eyes bugged out, and he begun to stare down with no end of
interest, because that was where his originals come from; but I didn't
more than half believe it. I couldn't, you know; it seemed too awful far
away for us to have traveled.
But Tom was full of his discovery, as he called it, and said the lions
and the sand meant the Great Desert, sure. He said he could 'a' found out,
before we sighted land, that we was crowding the land somewheres, if he
had thought of one thing; and when we asked him what, he said:
"These clocks. They're chronometers. You always read about them in sea
voyages. One of them is keeping Grinnage time, and the other is keeping
St. Louis time, like my watch. When we left St. Louis it was four in the
afternoon by my watch and this clock, and it was ten at night by this
Grinnage clock. Well, at this time of the year the sun sets at about seven
o'clock. Now I noticed the time yesterday evening when the sun went down,
and it was half-past five o'clock by the Grinnage clock, and half past 11
A.M. by my watch and the other clock. You see, the sun rose and set by my
watch in St. Louis, and the Grinnage clock was six hours fast; but we've
come so far east that it comes within less than half an hour of setting by
the Grinnage clock now, and I'm away out-more than four hours and a half
out. You see, that meant that we was closing up on the longitude of
Ireland, and would strike it before long if we was p'inted right-which we
wasn't. No, sir, we've been a-wandering-wandering 'way down south of east,